Life on the Playground
As a primary
school teacher for the last 10 plus years, I have always loved taking my
classes out onto the playground. You get
to know your students in a whole different way as you watch them "free
play". Children spend a large part of
their days being told what and when they are going to do things and ways to
think about things. Teachers place them
into homogeneous groups and heterogeneous groups to work on problems. Many primary teachers also assign seats so
students are told where to sit and whom to sit next to. (There are many sound educational reasons
that these decisions happen.)
Enter...the
playground. Recess, it's most kids
favorite part of the school day. I have
students who cannot tell time, but they know when recess happens. If we ever miss recess, half the class lets
me know it.
As we burst
out of the school onto the playground, choices happen and groups form almost
instantly. You have the group who loves
to swing on the swings and see whose feet can touch the sky first. Then there is another group who imagines they
are the "good" guys and the other group who are the "bad"
guys (they have to take turns on this one), and they run full speed ahead
trying to catch each other. Then you
have the group who are competing to see who can get across the overhead ladder
the fastest. And then the group who just
likes to hang out under the slide chatting.
Leaders of
those groups form and it is interesting to see how that leadership takes
shape. If leaders don't think about the
group as a whole, they are quickly ignored, and possibly avoided, and the group
quickly follows another who values the group's wishes. All of these decisions happen without an
adult orchestrating the process.
Students who might not get the opportunity to lead, because maybe
physical prowess is not valued in the classroom, get the chance to shine. Their self esteem soars!
No comments:
Post a Comment